If your electric furnace is more than eight years old, uses a Watlow Power Series SCR, and is excruciatingly sluggish, there's a function that can be disabled in the SCR which is likely the cause. The function is displayed as HCYC, and it was set up to solve a theoretical problem that never materialized. Instead, this function causes near-debilitating sluggishness.

A little backstory--Wet Dog Glass stopped using these SCRs after only using four of them 10 years ago when Watlow admitted that they use cheap current transformers because the vast majority of customers for this product use it for burst firing--not phase angle, and that the cheap current transformers were indeed the cause of the problem I was having. After having another brand new furnace fail to function properly, Watlow had me disable the HCYC function. That adjustment worked immediately. A few months ago, I remembered this fix when a furnace that previously functioned well began to drag on its way to melt temp after ten years of service. Since then I've helped a number of non-Wet Dog Glass furnace owners who were at wit's end over how slow the furnaces were, and those who found the HCYC function enabled and then disabled it reported that their furnace was like "a whole new animal!"

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